the making of the book is that it was 'compiled from unconnected scraps and reminiscences during conversations'. In other words, Clarke acted as a reasonably enfranchised stenographer. Mrs. Cowden Clarke, in My Long Life, says something of her husband's share in Nyren's book, referring to Nyren as 'a vigorous old friend who had been a famous cricketer in his youth and early manhood, and who, in his advanced age, used to come and communicate his cricketing expressions to Charles with chuckling pride and complacent reminiscence'. One thing is certain and that is that Clarke, who wrote much in the course of his life, never wrote half so well again as for Nyren; and this is an important piece of evidence in favour of his duties being chiefly the reproduction of the old cricketer's racy talk. I have seen, I think in the Tatler, Leigh Hunt's paper, an original description of a match by Cowden Clarke, which contains no suggestion of the spirit of the 'Tutor'. At the same time, I must confess that the little sketch of a cricket festivity from John Nyren's unaided hand, which I quote below, is also so unlike the 'Tutor' as to cause us to wish that Cowden Clarke had been reporting his friend then also. Neither man did such spirited work alone as when the two were together.
The best account of John Nyren is that which Cowden Clarke wrote for the second edition of their book, in 1840, after Nyren's death, beginning thus: 'Since the publication of the First Edition of this little work, the amiable Father of it has been gathered to the eternal society of all good men.' Cowden Clarke continues:—'My old friend was a "good Catholic"—"good," I mean, in the mercantile acceptation of the term—a "warm Catholic"; and "good" in the true sense of the word I declare he was; for a more single- and gentle-hearted, and yet thoroughly manly man I never knew; one more forbearing towards the failings of others, more unobtrusively steady in his own principles, more cheerfully pious; more free from cant and humbug of every description.
